By Sasha Elenko, Food Columnist
Dear mom,
I know I have another whole year before I am to be cast off to fend for myself in the overwhelming entropy of college campus food courts. And before that time comes, another Mother’s Day will pass, and I will have to come up with another food-related way to say thank you.
But in the words of … well, yours truly: “Speak now or forever hold your peas.” So here are my peas — my peas of gratitude.
- For operating the world’s best free restaurant — Before you say (or think) anything, I know. This sounds wrong. In fact, you often like to differentiate our kitchen from a restaurant, insofar as I have to eat everything on my plate and wash the dishes afterwards. Potato, potato. The defining characteristic of a restaurant is culinary excellence, and if 17 years of experience is anything to go by, restaurants should strive to prepare food like you do.
- For being the world’s most authoritarian health nut — Regardless of how many times my friends have grumbled over the conspicuous absence of bread, milk and any type of cereal that anyone ever has actually heard of (i.e. not Nature’s Path Millet Rice, also known as cardboard), I cannot thank you enough.
Not only for keeping GMOs, additives, preservatives, corn starch and anything that is in any other way non-organic out of the house — but also for ensuring a constant and abundant supply of rice milk, coconut milk, almond milk, hemp milk and five varieties of extra virgin olive oil.
In all seriousness, it pains me to envision the mental and physical shape I would be in today — much less later in my life — had you not raised me to have a more-than-somewhat-acute sense of what I am putting in my body.
- For subliminally programming me to experiment with cooking — I cannot estimate the number of times we have been at Thriftway — you, shopping, and I, starving — when I have asked for a burrito (or some other prepared food), and you have replied with the perennially irritating “We have all of the ingredients at home.”
Well, believe it or not, I have now grown accustomed to the extension of that phrase echoing inside my head every time I am at Thriftway by myself. That is, “Do we have all of the ingredients at home?” I don’t know mom, do we?
- For making sure that I am never without food — Did you know it has been scientifically proven that a sense of gratitude can be synthesized within the “hearts” of even the most ingrate of adolescents?
This can be achieved through the mere sight of dinner being prepared upon entering their homes in the evening. I suspect that you were, in fact, already aware of that profound tidbit because you have done just that nearly every night of my life.
Maybe someday I might be willing to take on an endeavor like that, but until then — wow!
Love,
Sasha
P.S. Shoutout to Jil Stenn for being my substitute food mama!